


Recuerdo

by threedays



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Post-Season/Series 12
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:36:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23159410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threedays/pseuds/threedays
Summary: Memories are toxins in your bloodstream. They travel. Sometimes they affect a single body part at a time. Other times, the infection is systemic, and you find yourself incapacitated with the weight of the grief in your blood and bones.But it helps not being in prison.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 23





	Recuerdo

Memories are toxins in your bloodstream. They travel.

Day 37, she feels them in her knees. She’s weak and wobbly. Maybe it’s the prison food – The Earth rhinoceros eats leaves, so she supposes in a way it’s amusing that the Judoon serve nothing but leafy greens – she’s got iron but no protein, and exhaustion is her constant companion – but on this day, her weakness feels related more to the memories poisoning her system. Images churn behind her eyelids. Towers looming. A needle held in a trusted hand. The Master above her as she knelt on a cold floor, hating him. The Master behind her as she ran, again, from Gallifrey, leaving an innocent to die so the guilty could die, too, and if she could have saved either one of them – the old man who chose to die in her stead, or the cold-hearted villain who spent lifetimes in pursuit of her torment – she’s not sure who she would have chosen --

Or, she _is_ sure, but can’t make herself say it, even in her head.

Weak in the knees. Weak everywhere. She stays down, on day 37, against the floor.

**

Day 53. Things she can’t remember make her chest tight, the space between her two hearts aching as if she’s been punched, or lifted something really heavy yesterday, or lost a loved one. She doesn’t like remembering, it’s painful and it’s dangerous, but if there’s one thing she likes less than remembering, its _not_ remembering. What she can’t remember, she can’t control. It could do anything to her, pop out of the growing cracks in her mind and overtake her in an ambush. She can’t have a plan ready if she doesn’t know what or when she’ll have to fight. Pain makes her short-tempered, short of breath, short on patience, and she paces the eleven steps of her cell – eight if she walks normally, but she short-strides to make the distance seem longer – back and forth until vertigo overtakes the pain. Not knowing _sucks._ She gets a flash of sudden sympathy for her fam, remembers them gathered on the stairs watching her busily _not telling them things._ She’s been defensive and secretive under the guise of protecting them, and now she wonders if she punched them between their – no, beside their single hearts.

**

Memories wake her on day 65, a surge of sudden acid into her throat, the taste of fear. She’s urgent, hearts racing, on her feet before she’s completely awake, hands tracing along the stone walls. The stars outside are fuzzy, dancing in her vision. She thinks she sees a planet, far away in the distance, but she doesn’t recognize it and it won’t stop moving. She laps the small cell once, twice, hands increasing pressure, trace becoming scratch, scratch becoming claw. She needs to _feel._ She remembers his eyes, always different but never a stranger’s, burning with madness, softening with shared memory. The Master is dead. She knows it like she knows the constellation of Kastaborous, from a multitude of angles. She vomits something leafy and wilted, cries into the mess like she’s the only small child she remembers ever being. Her hands dig for purchase, fingertips bleeding against the stone floor. In sixty-five days, she’s heard nothing from any of the other cells she imagines surround hers, so she stops holding onto the screams and lets them come.

Later, her voice gone to ruin and the blood drying under her fingernails, she rolls onto her back and stares up at the close, smooth ceiling. She looks deliberately away from the window, from the stars. It hurts to see the stars and not touch them. It has _always_ hurt to see the stars and not touch them.

**

Day 87. She does not remember. She does not imagine. She does not stir from the floor, listless gaze on the ceiling, unfocused. Neither does she eat the greenery or drink the lukewarm water allotted her. Her bloodstream has stopped circulating the memories. Her bloodstream is dead. Her memories are dead. Her hearts are dead. As far as anyone knows, the Doctor is dead. She stops doing anything and attempts to cease completely, but as the seconds stubbornly tick into Day 88 regardless of her efforts, she gives up, and rises.

**

Day 112. The Doctor has chipped a bit of stone off the frame around the window. It took quite a bit of work, some cursing, several long days full of bleeding fingertips and rage, and at least one cracked tooth, but she has a tool now. She uses the small shard of stone to scratch markings against the blankness of the walls. Circles and loops. Gallifreyan names, some she knows and some she’s quite certain she doesn’t, in the same way that she’s quite certain she doesn’t know Ruth. Day 113, 114, 115 find her still circling the walls, scratch-scratching memories onto the surface so she can get their lead weight off her mind.

Day 121, she reads back the last thing she wrote, and it is a memory she can’t recall actually having. Funny, that.

**

Day 154. Her brain is not connected. Her hearts are not engaged. Her hands alone do the work of remembering, scratch-scratching her story into stone. Every square inch of the north wall is covered (and there is no north, not here, but she needs to call it something, and she likes the north, it’s where her accent comes from, so the wall that has the window is the north wall now). When she stops to read the unfamiliar words she’s written that she _swears_ she doesn’t recognize, her hands pass the small shard of stone back and forth between her palms. She misses the weight and the comfort of the sonic, but this small piece of stone has become her worry stone, her fidget spinner – (grand things, fidget spinners, she loves to get a whole bunch of them going at once, until she loses her grip and they clatter to the floor and Graham rolls his eyes to the ceiling) – her grounding technique. It helps to have a tool. Early humans loved their tools, which they fashioned from stone much the way she did this one. She uses it to write, but also, sparingly, to cut her salad into bite-sized pieces just because she can.

**

Day 207. The walls, the floor, the inside of the door are all storied, and she’s on her third shard of stone. She reads back the tales of a faraway place, of a door left open, of an opportunity she wasn’t able to resist. She reads eagerly as if it is a good fiction – she and Graham settled on opposite ends of the library sofa in comfortable silence, occasionally reading out bits of their very different novels to one another – he and Bill doing a bit of study on some dusty tome that set his hearts aflutter and made her eyes roll about in her head – he and River reading trashy romance novels in bed on Darillium and adding their own elaborate plot twists – but this isn’t a fiction and both her hearts know it. She doesn’t remember in her brain, and she is hundreds of bodies on, but something in her hearts recalls this story, even though she’s reading way back in the very first chapter.

**

Day 233.

When a high-security space prison is crumbled by a meteor strike in a universe that scoffs at “high security,” the inmates and guards alike are sucked out into the vacuum of space. There, depending on their species and their capacity for foregoing oxygen or whatever else it is they breathe, they engage in varying speeds of inevitable death.

Everything slows.

She blinks at the stars, among them once again, where she belongs.

When a high-security space prison is crumbled by a meteor strike, chunks of the building itself, shards of wall shattered by the impact, also get sucked out and float about in space. Some of them float about undiscovered, but others are retrieved.

There is a halfhearted rescue attempt by nearby Axlotl 7, whose lizardy inhabitants are reclusive but responsible. It’s a hassle to have to mount a rescue, but nobody else is going to do it. At least this way they can say they tried, and history will continue to remember them – when it remembers them at all – as a neighborly species that did its part.

Anyway, it’s not like there’s truly anything to save. Most of the inmates and guards alike have been torn apart in the impact or flung about the vacuum of space. Only a handful of species hang on long enough to be scooped by the rescue ship, and because they are dealing with a prison, the Axlotls don’t risk taking them back to their own planet. They dock with a trade ship, of the sketchy sort that frequents this corner of the universe, bartering for building supplies and restricted entertainment items and letting the inmates go cheap. They’re able to trade three large slabs of prison wall art for almost an entire case of Earth toilet roll. Now they’re headed home with a ship full of goodies, and at the end of the day, they can say they did their part.

It’s all the better anyway. Without the prison for neighbors, maybe the value of travel to Axlotl-7 will begin, for the first time in centuries, to rise.

***

Memories are toxins in your bloodstream. They travel. Sometimes they affect a single body part at a time. Other times, the infection is systemic, and you find yourself incapacitated with the weight of the grief in your blood and bones.

But it helps not being in prison.

Even captured by traders, even taken to a planet known for auctioning all sorts of illegal ware, including rare species from throughout the universe – it still helps, _really_ helps, not being in prison.

In prison, all there was to do was remember. Out here, she can do things to distract herself.

She can eat things in colors other than green. She can write with a pen if she can steal one.

She can start the arduous task of collecting the scattered bits of her story, committed to stone and flung about the universe. Three are here. Others have gone and she’ll have to track them down, once she’s finished the pesky task of getting free of this unfortunate slave trade.

Out here, she can take more than eight regular or eleven small steps in a single direction.

She can make a plan, and scratch that plan, and make another plan.

She can make new memories instead of drowning in the old ones.

She can begin to collect the scattered bits of herself into something resembling the Doctor.

**Author's Note:**

> I'M SORRY ABOUT THE TOILET ROLL I had to
> 
> And we're out, btw


End file.
